Accuracy of Interoceptive Anticipation and Interoceptive Discrepancy paradigms
Two paradigms introduced together by Wilzok, Adamic, Khalsa & Croy (2023), described on one page because they share a familiarization phase, a stimulus set, a rating instrument and a purpose, and differ in exactly two design decisions.
The two decisions that separate them
| Accuracy of Interoceptive Anticipation | Interoceptive Discrepancy | |
|---|---|---|
| when anticipation is rated | retrospectively, on the 2/3 of trials where no stimulus arrived | prospectively, after the cue and before every stimulus |
| what stimulus follows the cue | the cued intensity, on 1/3 of trials | the cued intensity, or ±1 level, at 1/3 each — on every trial |
| what it yields | anticipation and experience as separate quantities, never on the same trial | a within-trial anticipation→experience pair, and an experimentally induced mismatch |
| what it cannot do | speak to expectation violation at all | give an uncontaminated anticipation estimate for an un-violated expectation after the first few trials, since two-thirds of trials teach the cue is unreliable |
That last cell is the paradigms’ unresolved tension and neither the authors nor this wiki can currently settle it. The ID paradigm’s manipulation works by making the cue misleading two-thirds of the time. A participant who notices — and the whole paradigm rests on their noticing, since that is what discrepancy awareness is — should rationally regress their anticipations toward the middle as the block proceeds. Trial-order effects on anticipation ratings are not reported.
What they are for
They exist to give Paulus & Stein’s clinical thesis an instrument. If psychopathology is a failure to appropriately anticipate interoceptive states, then anticipation has to be measurable as a graded quantity, separately from the experience it is an anticipation of, and the mismatch between them has to be quantifiable. That is precisely the shape of these tasks, and it is why the interoceptive-psychopathology programme is the stated target application (anxiety, depression, anorexia, fibromyalgia).
The measured quantity is not precision in the psychophysical sense, and should not be reported as such. It is a signed magnitude gap between two reports.
Placement among the wiki’s methods
The wiki’s interoceptive tasks divide by what they hold fixed:
- Threshold instruments (FDT, RRST, HRDT) fix the judgement — was there a signal — and vary the stimulus to find where perception fails.
- Attention paradigms (interoceptive-attention-task) fix nothing and have no correct answer; they measure where attention goes.
- Learning paradigms (BLT) vary a cue-outcome contingency and fit a learning model to the trial sequence.
- These paradigms fix the physical stimulus set and vary the expectation, then read the gap. They are the only ones in the wiki whose dependent variable is a mismatch between a forecast and an outcome.
The nearest neighbour is the BLT, and the difference is instructive: Harrison et al. fit a formal learning model to trial-by-trial predictions and recover prediction certainty and prediction error as model parameters; Wilzok et al. take the participant’s own numerical report of the gap. The BLT is computationally richer; these paradigms are cheaper, run in two channels, and ask the person rather than the model.
The nociception question
Half of the validated application is pinprick pain, which raises the nociception scope problem directly: if only visceral nociception counts as interoceptive (Ceunen, Vlaeyen & Van Diest 2016), then one of the two channels here is somatosensory and the paradigm’s cross-channel claim is not an interoceptive one. The authors take the broad Craig-style line explicitly. Anyone using these paradigms inherits that commitment and should state it.
What would establish them
- A clinical sample. The paradigms were built for interoceptive-psychopathology and have never been run in it. The whole rationale is untested.
- Relation to self-report. MAIA-2 was collected in the validation study and never reported against task measures. Whether anticipation accuracy relates to sensibility is the obvious first question and remains open.
- A third channel, and a resting comparison. Adding cardiac or gastric would test whether the r = 0.57 survives; running a non-aversive variant would test whether it is perturbation that produces it (see is-interoception-domain-general).
- Trial-order analysis, for the reason in the table above.